An Act of Persuasion(8)
“I am sorry you’re upset. I’m sorry my actions have made you feel this way.”
Messy and emotional. Everything Ben Tyler rejected in his life, she knew. It pissed her off all over again, especially since she couldn’t control it. Blindly, she reached out to the shelves that covered most of the walls of his office. A snow globe she’d bought him on a vacation to Vegas was within range. He’d laughed when she had given it to him, telling her it was the tackiest thing he’d ever seen. But he kept it in his office, where he could see it every day.
She threw it as hard as she could and listened as it shattered against the bookshelves on the other side of the room.
“That was childish,” he said calmly.
Anna crossed her arms over her chest knowing she needed to get away. First, she needed to leave the room before the tears came. That would be step one. The second step would be infinitely harder. But as she looked at him, his face now expressionless, she knew she couldn’t stay with him. Not like this. It didn’t matter what happened anymore. It didn’t matter that she knew now how he truly felt.
The truth was the treatment he chose for himself might kill him. Was she supposed to stay and watch that?
Was she supposed to sit like a good girl while she was abandoned? Again.
No. She wouldn’t do it.
She needed to leave him before her heart bled out into her chest after being crushed so thoroughly. And she died alongside him. That’s the thought she had to cling to.
She wasn’t leaving Ben, she was saving herself.
“Fine,” she said, calling on every ounce of strength she had to do what needed to be done. “It just happened. You need to be dropped off at the hospital. I understand perfectly. I’ll make sure the glass gets cleaned up. Stay away from it in the meantime.”
“Anna—”
“No,” she said, holding her hand up. “I control what we get to talk about from now on and I don’t want to discuss this any longer.”
He didn’t like that, she could see it in his expression.
He sneered then, not content to let her have the last say on the matter. “I was only going to say...you throw like a girl.”
“Screw you,” she fired back. “Oh, wait. I already did.”
CHAPTER THREE
Present day
SHE WAS HERE. The deep satisfaction he felt as he watched her walk through the country club room where they were hosting the party was intense. Ben stood on the balcony talking to one of his clients. And without turning his head, he knew the instant she’d arrived.
He wouldn’t suggest anything so melodramatic as to say he could intuit her presence. But he wouldn’t discount his body’s response to her arrival. His muscles tightened, his heart rate accelerated.
It had been twelve weeks since he’d last seen her. Three months since he’d heard her voice. The fact that he knew down to the minute when she’d last spoken to him—shouted at him actually—was appalling. It was a sign he wasn’t busy enough. He would think about resuming a more normal working schedule now that he was finally back on his feet.
“I heard it was a close thing.”
Ben stared at the short balding man he’d invited to the party, which was in part a celebration as well as a goodbye. Madeleine Kane, one of his employees and dearest friends, was leaving Philadelphia to join her fiancé, Michael Langdon, in Detroit. While she would still work for the Tyler Group as a political consultant, she would no longer be in the office on a regular basis. Ben thought it fitting to send her off with the well-wishes of her colleagues and a few high-profile clients.
Stan Butterman was one of those clients.
“I mean, word was you were on death’s door.”
Ben despised euphemisms. They trivialized what was never trivial. “I was sick, but I’m doing much better now.”
And he was. Where the first round of induction chemo had failed to put his cancer in remission, the second round of treatment killed off the cancer cells completely. The stem cell transplantation, while risky, had worked to rebuild his immune system. His red and white blood cell counts were normal, and there were no signs of his body rejecting the foreign cells.
He still fought fatigue like it was a mortal enemy, but in the past twelve weeks since undergoing the treatment, he’d put on weight and had managed a limited strength-building exercise routine. It was starting to make a difference. Now he could go hours without needing to rest.